The Wine Democracy: You choose the wine at Kommune

Kommune is well-known for many things: its outdoor seating, cappuccinos the size of your face, afternoon barbecues. Now adding to that list is a new monthly event they’re calling “The Wine Democracy,” where customers choose the next month’s house wine in the best form possible: with a free wine tasting.I recently went to their inaugural tasting, which included a relatively small number of people, due to the heat and folks being on holiday. The intimate setting was nice for mingling, which hopefully continues as more people come in the following months.The set-up is pretty simple: There are five tasting stations, with one red and one white at each, for a total of ten wines. Each wine is represented by a separate distributor, whose nationality might slightly give away the origin of the wine (e.g. French, Australian, etc.), but the wine labels are covered to keep the tasting as blind as possible. You get a card and a pencil, and as you go around tasting the wines, check a Yes if you like what you’re tasting, and a No if you don’t. The cards are then collected and tallied, and thus, next month’s house wine is decided.The Wine Democracy is open to anyone, so long as you enjoy drinking wine. Just contact Kommune to get an invite first. The event will place on the last Thursday of every month.I met some who were obviously up on their vino, sniffing their glasses and declaring that it couldn’t be a sauvignon blanc, and others who were simply happy to be tasting ten (or fifteen) glasses of wine on a hot summer evening.Photos by Grant Oh and Edna Zhou